La Villita Historic District

La Villita is a 15-acre district in San Antonio, four blocks from the Alamo and beside downtown, bounded by Durango, Navarro, Alamo and the San Antonio River. It holds twenty-seven notable buildings, mostly simple masonry houses of stucco-covered brick, adobe, caliche block or stone, along with a reconstructed palisado house, a church of 1876 and a German-English school begun in 1859. The site was once a Coahuiltecan village and later a Spanish-era barrio, with the name La Villita recorded in 1792. German immigrants arrived in the 1840s, followed by Swiss and French settlers, giving the quarter a European character. After decaying into a slum in the early twentieth century, it was restored in a two-year project begun in 1939 by the city, the San Antonio Conservation Society and the National Youth Administration. The district was listed for preserving a record of vernacular nineteenth-century Texas architecture and the layered cultures of San Antonio.